Taking care of animal health

The first advances to improve animal health are now a reality. The second working meeting of the forum on animal health, where members of the Livestock Roundtable of La Rioja participated, along with other agents in the sector, such as independent livestock farmers, forestry agents and the general directorates of Natural Environment and Landscape and Agriculture and Livestock served to reach consensus and work on improvements related to animal health.

The livestock sector is going through a difficult time that requires urgent solutions in order to maintain economic activity and the viability of farms, as guarantors of life and the economy in a large part of the small municipalities of Rioja. One of these factors focuses on policies aimed at helping to improve the health situation of the livestock herd, especially in the face of tuberculosis disease. In this way, the forum is working on the preparation of a technically justified document that the regional Executive intends to present to the ministry with the aim of implementing improvements in the national tuberculosis eradication program.

At the same time, the Government of La Rioja has committed to implementing all the measures within its reach to help animal health. The upcoming approval of a new universal order for animal health aid stands out, the text of which is being finalized and whose main objective is for the regional Executive to have a tool with which to quickly help if they are affected by any disease, of the known or those that are to come, and to be able to help in an agile and fast way.

Likewise, counselor Noemí Manzanos reported on the three agreements reached with professional agricultural organizations: the first, the commitment to have permanent contact between forestry agents and the Ministry’s Livestock Service, which allows greater control of the hunting fauna; the second, the Government’s commitment to assume the cost of removing dead animals that ranchers have been assuming until now; and the third agreement, the assumption of financial responsibility when carrying out the clean-ups. That is to say, if an animal injured its leg or had any problem when going for sanitation, the farmer himself had to assume the costs, something that, from now on, will be paid for by the regional Executive.